Sharing the knowledge

Last Tuesday, I was a teacher for the morning. Start Up Guernsey had asked me to take part in their series of events for Global Entrepreneurship Week and teach a workshop on the basics of WordPress. To be honest I was terrified at first, but there were only 15 places up for grabs, and it’s good to challenge yourself, right?

So I delved into preparations by designing the slides of my powerpoint presentation. I made a lovely template that fitted in nicely with my new brand and I decided which bits of WordPress were basic and which more advanced. Slowly but surely it all came together, but I still needed a structure?

Should people bring their laptops? Would I answer very specific questions about one person’s website? Would there be a Q&A session after the presentation? Should we have a break? Would I need to provide biscuits?

In the end I decided that 15 people were too many to all be sitting on their laptops and asking me specific questions about their own websites. I would run through my presentation, which hopefully would take about an hour, then there was one hour left. I figured that there should be at least a bit of a practical element to the workshop, so I built a shell WordPress site, with the plan of showing people how to install plugins, where to click and a few little tricks that I find helpful when building in WordPress.

Turned out my plan was sound. On Tuesday morning 10 of us gather at the Digital Greenhouse to talk about WordPress. Now, as you might have worked out by now, but I had never given a talk or held a workshop before, so I was a bit nervous at the beginning, but soon got into the swing of things. People were asking questions as we went along and we managed to cover quite a lot of the WordPress basics and a bit more.

I for one really enjoyed the morning and was pleasantly surprised at how easy I found it to not only talk in front of people but also to answer their questions coherently. I had a lot of positive comments and emails afterwards and feel very encouraged to continue teaching people how to build and manage their own websites. Watch out for more workshops and one-by-one tutorial opportunities coming up soon.